


Landslide

by gin_eater



Series: Interstate Love Songs [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Deadlock Gang, F/M, Navel-Gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-22 19:24:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19979098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: After giving McCree's proposition a few months of thought, Ashe does the previously unthinkable, and bids farewell to the Deadlock Rebels.





	Landslide

_Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?_   
_Can the child within my heart rise above?_   
_Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?_   
_Can I handle the seasons of my life?_

_Well, I've been afraid of changing_  
 _'Cause I've built my life around you_  
 _But time makes you bolder_  
 _Even children get older_  
 _And I'm gettin' older, too…_  
Fleetwood Mac, «Landslide»

As far as retirement parties went, Ashe didn't think she'd ever heard tell of a bigger one, at least in the circles she ran in. Truth be told, it was nearly been a rally unto itself -- when the sole remaining founder and national president of the most notorious MC in the country announces her intention to turn in her colors after twenty years on the road, it tends to draw a fair amount of interest from even the fringe chapters. Representatives had ridden in from as far east as Florida and north as Montana, to shake her hand and cast their votes for the one that would be replacing it.

They gathered just past dusk, in the dry bed of Deadlock Gorge proper. Her people had gone all out: a bonfire the size of a garden shed, fireworks and hooch from home, and no time wasted before breaking into either.

Cookie, the group's sargeant-at-arms, had put a handful of prospects to work digging two grave-sized barbecue pits the day before, and a small ranch's worth of briskets, ribs and sausages had been smoked to pull-apart perfection over a bed of smoldering mesquite. They'd even gotten hold of and done up a whole cow's head, and promised Ashe first crack at the tongue for her tacos, which she took as both a gesture of respect and mild sexual harassment, and both thanked and cuffed them upside the head accordingly.

Cookie was good people, though -- well, perhaps _good_ was a bit of a stretch, but they were good at what they did, a lot of which involved the unorthodox usage of an impressive variety of kitchen utensils, and their fuse was long and tough to light, barring insult to Deadlock, and especially its leadership. They'd come into the gang fifteen years ago at thirty-five, and for Ashe it had been like acquiring a playfully perverted uncle, one who looked out for her with one eye and up and down with the other.

It had never bothered her; she knew Cookie would sooner leap in front of an oncoming hypertrain before doing anything that would make Ashe order B.O.B. to throw them in front of one herself. The majority of her people would, or were at least wise enough to pay lip service to the idea. Ashe was their sister, little to some, big to others, but minded with the same level of respect they otherwise reserved for their mothers and memaws, if they had ones worth minding -- more, if they didn't -- and they trusted her with their lives and livelihoods in turn. That held true even now, on the cusp of her departure -- a day that, six months ago, she wouldn't have been able to envision without a body full of bullet holes immediately preceding it.

As she watched the festivities unfold, she wondered, not for the first time, what the hell she was doing, how she could be such a fucking schmuck as to let a prodigal son of a bitch like Jesse McCree sweet-talk her into letting him live, _with_ her damned bike, while germinating the seed of some ridiculous fucking notion that they could pick back up where they'd begun and run away together.

It galled her that, after two venomously embittered decades spent blessing his heart and cursing his name, she was still such a fool for that man; rankled her so much she'd spent the better part of eight weeks running their last encounter over and over again in her head -- running _him_ over in her head, more often than not, or sometimes, in dreams, where her spite had less say in the matter, just plain running over to him.

Who the hell did he think he was, that he could just up and tell her almost everything she'd been needing to hear from him since she was nineteen goddamn years old? That he could have that fucking hangdog look in his hazel eyes while he tweaked her ear and smiled that charmingly crooked smile of his that made her want to throw him out a window and herself right after, just for the pleasure of landing on him, boots first, when she called his bluff about catching her?

Christ, who was she kidding? He knew exactly who he was, and so did she: the smug, soft-soaping turncoat whose stupid sleeping face she hadn't been able to bring herself to shoot. He hadn't done more than lie there, a beautiful idiot sprawled on his back atop starchy motel bedclothes, clad in cactus-print boxers and one gray sock, mouth open wide and sawing logs the way he only ever did when he hadn't gone to bed so much as been wrung out of a bartender's rag the night before, and Ashe's heart had cramped so hard she wouldn't have been shocked to hear a rib crack. For a split-second, she'd been nineteen again, about to toe off her boots and creep quietly into bed beside him, to thread an arm around his waist and nuzzle close with her cheek against the freckled skin of his shoulder.

She'd snapped back to thirty-nine just as fast, but too late all the same: nostalgia had sucker-punched the rage she'd been so meticulously cultivating and knocked it, wheezing and discombobulated, to the floor. He always did that, always left her feeling addled and ambivalent and allover weak. She'd never hit her knees on account of any other person not holding a badge or a baseball bat; all McCree had to do to take her down was be alone in a room with her and breathe.

Because he knew exactly who she was, too.

She was the runaway who'd snuck into the bed of his pickup truck while he robbed the Bucky's Kwik Fuel east of Clovis, and who, upon revealing herself, had managed to convince him to help her hold herself ransom just to see if her folks would bother to pay it.

She was the first person who'd made him honestly believe that his life could amount to more than peanut fields and petty theft, and the one he'd told in return that she was the only thing of real value her parents had ever produced.

She was the partner in crime whose hand he'd held when they'd had their arms branded Deadlock for life, and she was the asshole who'd pranked him on his eighteenth birthday with a Property Of Ashe patch taped across the yoke of his cut, and she was the control freak who could probably orchestrate a successful fleecing of Fort Knox, but god help her if she had to keep track of her keys in an empty room -- which was, incidentally, what had led her to him the last time: not the bike, but the tiny homing device B.O.B. had admitted to installing on the sly in the folded seam of the leather name tag on her keyring. The signal had died about twenty minutes after she'd left the motel, which sounded about right for McCree to have gotten some coffee in him and recovered enough of his faculties to work out its presence. He'd probably had a good laugh about it, too, the prick.

"C'mon, boss, it's your last night -- join the fun!"

Ashe frowned as her empty taco plate was plucked from her hand and replaced with a lit sparkler, and cocked a brow at the lanky blue-eyed boy grinning bashfully -- and maybe a little fearfully -- in front of her.

"Seriously, Terran?"

"Say cheese!"

"Goddamn it!" she swore, blinking the spots from her eyes courtesy of P.T.'s phone. "Fuckin' warn a gal first!"

"He said to say cheese," Zeke pointed out.

"Why you little--"

"Oh, shit!"

The triplets scattered as Ashe dropped her sparkler and lunged, the other two cackling schadenfreude when she managed to snag Zeke by the collar of his cut and tug him into a headlock.

"Augh, fuck! Truce! Truce!"

"Truce?" Ashe asked, digging her knuckles into his scalp and nodding at P.T., whose phone was still clutched in his hand. "But that ain't the word y'all said to say before."

"Cheese!" Zeke hollered, while his brother snapped away, thrilled at his misfortune.

"What? I didn't quite catch that, all these fireworks…"

"Fuckin'-- _Cheese,_ goddamn it!"

Ashe gave his head another grind for good measure before turning him loose with a boot to his behind, then grabbed a fresh beer from a nearby cooler and resumed her dignified perch on the low boulder she'd claimed at her own. Probably she ought to be more sociable, but she'd always been the type to hole up in herself when feeling unsettled. It was one of the pitfalls of having a one-track mind -- whatever its destination, there would be no derailing it until it had run its course.

Anyway, it was her party: she'd brood if she wanted to.

So, yeah, McCree knew her -- knew what made her tick and what set her off, her talents and her failings, how to put her in a horn-tossing mood and what to say to simmer her back down again.

 _He can play you like a fuckin' fiddle, is what he can do,_ she groused to herself, puffing on a cigarette as she watched the topmost tongue of the bonfire's flames lick up at the stars and three-quarters of a Hunter's Moon.

But by the same token, she knew he wasn't the type to pick up an instrument without knowing there was a song that merited hearing primed to be pulled from its strings. Even if he'd laid out his proposal on a whim, he would never have made it if he didn't believe the potential payoff, whatever it might be, would be worth the trouble.

And the trouble was what Ashe lived for.

A combined forty years of black ops and illegal arms deals experience, of making friends in low places and enemies in high ones, and vice-versa… God, the shit they could get into now! The hell they could raise! It almost didn't even matter which hell, although she suspected McCree had a specific one in mind -- "Joel Morricone" could wear all the white hats he wanted; Jesse McCree was still a gun-toting fugitive with a price on his head, and while Ashe knew him to be one of the cleverest assholes she'd ever met, there was no way in any hell he'd stumbled upon a highly classified military transport timetable all by his lonesome anymore than she had.

It was possible that the train heist had been a one-off job -- that McCree being on friendly terms with its prettiest piece of cargo had simply been a coincidence that had turned a bounty hunt into a rescue mission. After all, stranger things had happened.

But the longer she turned it over in her head, the louder Ashe's gut told her that wasn't the case. McCree was more than up to something -- he was _into_ something, something _big,_ and whatever it was, Ashe bristled at the thought of being an unwitting pawn on its chessboard. If she'd grown so set in her ways as to allow either Deadlock or her legend to amount to little more than a move in somebody else's game, then some radical restructuring was required to put that back to rights -- of the gang, of her own methods of operation, and most especially of whatever thought it could manipulate her into playing by any other rules than her own.

Yeah. She was going to restructure the _crap_ out of that thing.

"Boss? … Ashe?"

"Hm?" She blinked back to the here-and-now, this time to find Bars standing a few feet away, the green and blue lights of his eyes bright and alien-looking in the desert dark.

"The others are thinking we ought to start the ride before everyone gets too hammered to hold the line. Is that good with you?" he asked.

Ashe sighed.

_Time to nut up or shut up..._

She took a final drag off her seventh cigarette of the evening, dropped the butt in the empty beer bottle that held its fellows, and tossed the bottle into the fire.

"Yeah, Bars, it's good," she said, hopping down from her boulder and dusting off the seat of her pants. "Let's do this."

It was a breathtaking, almost overwhelming sight: a line of some two hundred-odd hovercycles standing two abreast, reactors revving like rows of roaring panthers, throwing thunder at the sky, and the Rebels who rode them just as loud, whooping, howling, throwing horns in salute as Ashe approached her chopper at the front of the pack -- not Margaret, the hot little redhead now in McCree's possession, but the blonde -- Caterina, a bobbed bombshell of a '49 Hyper-Glide, unbranded but gussied up in Deadlock gold with black trim.

She downright _purred_ between Ashe's legs, her saddlebags packed with a few days' worth of clothes and basic toiletries, and Ashe's cut folded and stashed alongside them. In its place, she wore a relatively plain jacket of tooled black leather, with the Viper slung overtop. She'd worried about feeling naked without the patch that had adorned her back for almost the entirety of her adult life, and she did a bit, but there was a faint whiff of freedom about the thing, too. The shield was gone, but so was the target -- for now, anyway. What would happen to her standing with the gang when they discovered who she'd left to be with -- and they _would_ discover it, of that she had no doubt -- was a crapshoot, the outcome of which she could only hope for the best but prepare for the worst to occur.

And of course, she was never wholly unprotected: on the bike next to hers, B.O.B. was in full butler mode, buffed to a high gloss, staring straight ahead, waiting to be needed. Ashe had been unaccountably nervous when she'd informed him of Jesse's offer a few months back -- he wasn't the judgmental sort, B.O.B., but Deadlock were his people, too, and there was always that nagging specter of fear, even when she knew better, that he only stuck by her because of some stubborn piece of code in his programming, and that at some point that switch would be flipped, and one day he'd boot up and realize that being a part of her life was a waste of his.

It had flared a little when B.O.B. looked aside, processing, and after a moment, pulled up the small hard light screen that was his most prolix form of communication.

 _Midlife crisis?_ it read.

The fear fizzled out in a spike of indignation.

"No!" Ashe snapped, and then paused. "--Maybe? Ugh, I don't know! I just think… He's the only one who ever... I just…"

 _Want to go,_ B.O.B.'s screen glowed.

"I wanna _try,_ " said Ashe, and in saying it, knew it to be true -- gullibility, mild self-destructive streak and all.

And so B.O.B. had nodded his acceptance, and that was that. He was in, and Ashe began to tease apart the tangles that would enable them to get out.

The lead-up was far more complicated than the leaving itself, which required only that she and B.O.B. take the floor and state their intentions at one of Deadlock's mandatory monthly clubhouse meetings; it was how they -- well, she, mainly -- left things that would determine whether they were out good, or out bad. Changes in hierarchy were a potentially vulnerable time for any organization, and like hell was Calamity Ashe about to give anyone, Rebel or rival, cause to claim she'd left hers high and dry. She could go with McCree without becoming him.

That meant striving for as few hard feelings and loose ends as possible, squaring up on whatever favors she owed and closing any unfinished deals. It took another four months to see things tidied to a standard she could live with, during which the trickiest task was keeping the gang from growing too suspicious too soon, although they knew _something_ was brewing. Half of them thought she was dying and putting on a brave face about it; others were convinced she had a bun in the oven, and had started placing bets on who the daddy might be (McCree's name, thank god, hadn't made the pool, even if some of the ones that _had_ made Ashe question if an eye exam shouldn't be incorporated into the group's official membership requirements).

She did end up telling them a variation on the theme of the second theory: that Deadlock was her baby and she loved it dearly, but it would be halfway through college by now, if it were human. She'd raised it to stand on its own two feet, and now, she felt, was simply that time.

She supposed it at least spoke highly of the gang's opinion of her that no one had so much as floated the possibility of betrayal -- that she had turned narc or could be successfully blackmailed, be it by a foreign power looking to bolster their artillery at a discount, or just another club competing for said power's coin.

It put a knot in her stomach regardless, knowing how close something like that could look to the truth when viewed through the lens of confusion and disgust that was sure to follow -- that she'd only made an effort to get out good in a bid for leniency when it at last came to light that she was keeping company with someone who hadn't. Depending on who they voted in to replace her, there was every chance that, if she ever saw any of them again, it would be past the barrel of a gun aimed between her eyes. Maybe she and McCree both would see their bones laid to rest in Cookie's barbecue pits, with B.O.B. melted down into metallic tombstones over each.

But that was a bridge for a different day, to be crossed or burned as destiny saw fit; tonight was for the open road, as far as the eye could see and further, until she fell off the edge of her known world and into a new one.

Loosely, Deadlock territory could be said to stretch from the Grand Canyon to the Ozarks, with Route 66 their main drag. Ashe and B.O.B.'s last ride would take them east, with the gang set to follow until the Arizona-New Mexico state line, and then however further afield each individual felt like going until they were ready to say goodbye.

A chunk of them got off around Gallup -- mainly those who'd been bringing up the rear already, the out-of-towners and members of a more rank-and-file mentality -- but most hung around until the exits for Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

They peeled off in twos and threes after that, headlights angling in Ashe's mirrors towards sporadic neon pockets of civilization. Bars, identifiable by the distinctive glow of his mismatched eyes, left the line with a couple of Omnic prospects at Santa Rosa, and Ashe knew it was Cookie and their partner, Marisol, who took off at Montoya, on account of Cookie being the only one in the gang to have outfitted their bike with a Dixie horn.

It was the triplets who stayed the longest, riding in their characteristic V formation, Zeke at the point, flanked by P.T. on his left and Terran on his right. Her boys, full of piss and wind, rowdy, but reliable. They were Crisis orphans, and Ashe had been on affectionately caustic terms with the grandmother who'd raised them -- a disillusioned former Tuscon PD bomb technician whom Deadlock occasionally employed to consult on what heists were liable to require more incendiary approaches to infiltration. Her life had been long on tragedy and short on joy, and that had shown in every deep line across her ancient face, but she'd been tough as nails, quick as a whip, and mean as cat shit throughout. Ashe had liked her very much, and hoped to be just as much of a cantankerous old cow herself in another forty years' time.

Her grandsons had pledged together not a week after she'd passed, and brought with them the boon of Granny's IED recipe book, full of ingredients lists and their possible substitutes, and step-by-step instructions on how to build and disarm all manner of bombs and munitions, with the whole thing lovingly bound in a quilted book cover with three kittens cross-stitched on the front. The triplets had been Deadlock's ballistics specialists, and Ashe's own disgusting but devoted baby brothers, ever since.

The three of them got off at Glenrio, just across the Texas state line, thumping their hearts with a fist before raising their horns to the night sky.

Ashe and B.O.B. saluted back, and then finally, inescapably...

They were alone.

Her first thought wasn't a thought at all, but the awareness of a sudden dull, empty ache in her chest, a pins-and-needles painful fuzziness not unlike a limb falling asleep, as though she'd lost circulation to her sense of self.

Alone. They weren't Deadlock anymore and they were alone.

Shit. _Shit._

What the hell was she doing? What the _fuck_ had she been thinking, leaving the nest she'd spent half a lifetime feathering just to fly into McCree's fucking shitstorm of a life on the lam?

She didn't even know when or how she'd find him, not really -- months of trawling news feeds had yielded a sighting here, an opinion piece there, and she had a vague idea of where he'd been lurking last but nothing concrete, tips she wouldn't ordinarily have even considered acting upon and what the fuck kind of stupid name was Joel Morricone, anyway, who _fell_ for that?

_You, you fell for it, you dumb bitch. He got you to throw away everything you ever worked for on a wing and a prayer, and that bastard hasn't prayed for anything but his own goddamn hide since he was eighteen years old..._

She could turn around. She'd look stupid as fuck, but she was sure the gang would have her back. Maybe she could even play it off as a joke, a test, a ruse leading up to some big mystery payout -- god knew she had the funds to make it convincing, and it had never been about the money, not for her, and--

\--and then, she heard it: a low rumble at four o'clock, familiar and coming fast up the feeder road from Amarillo; a sound Ashe would have known half-deaf, as a parent knows the particular pitch of their own baby's cry.

Margaret.

A full-body shudder of surprise and relief racked its way through her like a big rig through a barricade. 

He'd come back. 

He'd come back to get her.

Ashe's lungs rushed back to life as they remembered how to function, and she forced her grip on Caterina's handlebars to relax, only for it to tighten anew as McCree closed the distance between them, serape flapping in the wind, shit-eating grin biting around his ubiquitous cigar -- the son of a bitch had dyed her hair!

Gone were Margaret's candy apple paint job and gleaming chrome pipes: she'd been turned into a literal shadow of her former self, blotted out front to rear by a layer of flat black, like a hastily-covered tattoo. Oh, when Ashe got her hands on that man, she was going to…

... Well, probably she'd smooch him, hard, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to strangle him while she did it.

"Took you long enough, princess!" McCree shouted, pulling up alongside her in the oncoming traffic lane. "Hey, B.O.B.!"

B.O.B. waved.

"Well I've been kinda busy!" Ashe yelled back, laughing -- _laughing_ \-- and he was, too, had that look in his eye same as when he was sixteen and ate silly for breakfast, and Ashe let it fill her, for the time being, with the sort of foolhardy happiness she'd felt the first time they'd ridden down this road together, side-by-side in his shitty old pickup and pointed in the opposite direction. "And don't call me princess!"

McCree smirked and sped past her, weaving back and forth across the yellow divider lines, taunting her, daring her.

Ashe glanced over at B.O.B., who gave her a thumbs-up, before she surged ahead -- he'd catch up with them before too long.

She and McCree took turns racing and braking, gunning it down straightaways and leaning in tight around turns. They traced S-curves together to form figure-eights, feeling each other out, rousing long-dormant rhythms from their slumber.

By the time the early morning commuters began to merge onto the highway, they were dancing: slipping in tandem around and through lines of diesel-belching tractor trailers and quietly humming electric sedans, finding that synchronized something left untouched by the time and torments between them -- the red thread of fate, maybe, or just plain old, run-of-the-mill, mule-stubborn sentimentality.

Hopefully, it was a little bit of both, like the combination of chance and skill that made a successful card sharp.

It was a hell of a thing to gamble on, and a hand Ashe would have to hold close to her chest, but that much, at any rate, was something she knew very well how to do:

Even when McCree had been gone, that was where he'd always managed to stay, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I headcanon that Ashe is a fucking nerd who names her bikes after famous warrior women, with Margaret of Anjou and Caterina Sforza represented here. The Hyper-Glide model is a next-gen riff on the Harley Hydra-Glide.
> 
> Thank you for reading. ♥ Now, where should they head off to first...


End file.
